Two Bihar government officials fined under RTI Act

Outlook India, PATNA, MAY 20, 2008(PTI)

Bihar Information Commission (BIC) has fined two officials - one for not providing information sought under the Right to Information (RTI) Act and another for not providing information within stipulated time.
The BIC fined the Public Information Officer (PIO) of Motihari Collectorate Rs 25,000 as the PIO was found guitly of not not responding to the application of one Nagendra Jaiswal who had sought certain information from him, Commission sources said.
The BIC directed the East Champaran District Magistrate to ensure the compliance of the Commission's order and inform it accordingly, they said. The Commission asked the PIO to provide relevant information latest by July two and fixed July 10 as the next date of hearing in the case.
Chief Information Commissioner Justice Shashank Kumar Singh slapped a fine of Rs 12,500 on the chief engineer of the Patna Muncipal Corporation R P Trivedi for not not supplying information to Indrani Sinha within the stipulated period. The fine would be deducted from the June and July salary of the chief engineer, BIC sources added.

Now, hospital rights on RTI activist’s list

PALLAVI SINGH

The Indian Express
Posted online: Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2310 hrs IST
New Delhi, May 14

Having propelled the public to invoke the Right to Information (RTI) Act for obtaining information on a variety of issues, social activist and Magsaysay awardee Arvind Kejriwal is taking his campaign for people’s rights to hospitals in the Capital.

From today onwards, volunteers from the Sunder Nagri branch of Kejriwal’s Parivartan will begin a campaign at the government-run Guru Tegh Bahadur (GTB) Hospital in Shahdara to identify lacunae in the distribution of medication to patients.

Their tool will be RTI applications once again. Parivartan volunteers will be filing these on behalf of patients denied medical facilities by the hospital.

“For quite some time now, our volunteers have been taking patients, repeatedly turned away by the hospital’s drug store without complete medication prescribed by doctors, to the hospital. Often, they were asked to get tests done from outside the hospital and in most cases, patients were denied medicines,” Kejriwal said.

He said he sought permission from the Delhi government to carry out an audit of the entire paper trail at the hospital. “The government turned down the offer but insisted there was no shortage of funds for hospitals,” Kejriwal said.
In a meeting between the hospital’s resident doctors’ association, medical superintendent and Health Secretary Vivek Rae earlier this month, the poor state of medical facilities at the hospital found special mention.
Earlier, in an audit conducted at the hospital, volunteers from Parivartan found the drug store didn’t have enough medical supplies for three months — a policy requirement for the hospital — and medical equipment for tests. “Patients were repeatedly being asked to get tests done from outside,” Kejriwal said.

While his organisation has already filed a few RTI applications with the hospital, volunteers from Parivartan would now be filing RTI applications for every patient, who is denied a full dose of medication and diagnostic tests.
“We are going to ask every patient in queue before the hospital pharmacy if he/she is being given medicines. If not, we’ll keep a record and file RTI applications. This will help us understand the shortcomings in the system,” he said.